Mikhail Gorelkin wrote: > We all have *two* me: the one is indefinable "I am" > (who thinks, the real one) and the another is the product of thinking > of the first one (me as I think about me).
Well, OK. I kindasorta agree. But, one has to realize that the latter me is just as "real" as the former me. These self-referencing loops are a part of reality. This is one area where English does just fine and (what we know of) mathematics starts to stumble (but not fall). > The perception of the > first one - mostly through intuition, imagination,... - of "external > things" is what we call *reality*. The problem is we are mostly > unaware about many details of it (they are beneath of our > consciousness) or it is very difficult to *articulate* them > correctly. Falling in love with a woman is here (try to describe this > unique feeling). Another example is: it took a quite some time to > recognize the essence of people and become more predictive about > their behaviors... The second one organizes our world around his > categorization, rationality, causality,... It is the *constructed* > reality. There is a gap inside of us: we differently "know" what > reality is and what we construct in our rational minds as "reality". It's true that constructed reality is not a perfect match of ... a priori reality (for lack of a better term). But I have to punctuate this argument again with the fact that the constructed reality, those thoughts inside someone's brain, are just as real as the a priori reality. There is no substantive difference (or at least there won't be once we get a better handle on neural correlates -- an engineering problem). There _may_ (emphasis on "may") be a modeling difference. A priori reality may not be a model of anything, i.e. it may not _refer_ to anything. Hence, it's a thing in and of itself and can't be used as a symbol. ... Maybe. In contrast, the constructed reality can be used as a model, primarily because it is an incomplete match with a priori reality. (A model cannot, by definition, be an exact match to its referent ... the map is not the territory.) But just because one chunk of reality can be used as a model and the other cannot doesn't mean one is more real than the other. > Here is an example from that Chaitin's lesson: we intuitively > (geometrically) "know" *all* points on the line but rationally can > name and compute... almost nothing (zero probability). Our second me > perceives everything when it appears in our rational mind as it is > created there, but the first one knows that... his companion lives > inside of the Matrix. And Godel's theorems exist only in that > artificial "reality". Our rational mind tries hard to fix these > problems and it cannot. It cannot even leave a zone of > zero-probability... The artist - call him a mathematician - is a real > me who exists in reality and through his art creates another one and > all fancy stuff there like Lie groups :-) --Mikhail Here's where my punctuation blurbs above matter. Those things like Goedel's result and Lie groups are just as real as apples, chairs, and the grand canyon. Just because they are constructed (artificial, synthetic) doesn't mean they hold some lower ontological or formal status in reality. What an extreme Platonist might argue is that these constructed rationale are not only more reflective of reality than chairs and apples but that they _are_ reality and the rest is illusory ... noise in the transduction between "out there" and "in here". To steal from Jack: Where we receive musical scales and party planning, the universe is transmitting maximally even sets. In the end, I don't believe either of the two "me"s is more real than the other. It all lies in the set of sensory-motor interactions, which may or may not be correlated with an occult "reality" beyond that. Going back to Chaitin, I agree fully with one of the things he _intended_ to say but that Feynman said better: What I cannot create, I do not understand. That states a direct relation between creation and language. I will also make the dubious claim that: What I cannot understand (in some medium), I cannot create. And that states the inverse relation. The point being that, even if it's solely subconsciously or through movement and action, all we know is what we can observe, manipulate, and talk about. The rest is supernatural and magical thinking. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
